A Little Twisted Reality

Lynn Cherny, @arnicas

alt-ai

https://ghostweather.slides.com/

lynncherny/a-little-twist-on-reality

A few new projects...

  • Rhyme Finder
  • Fantastical Britain (AI)
  • Genetic Algorithm Castles (AI-ish)
  • Remixing Cocktails

Coolness: All of these run purely in the browser -- no server code!

Rhyme Finder

Found poetry

Austin Kleon's newspaper blackout poetry

More "found poetry"

Tristan Tzara

in 1920

It is experimental in the sense of being something to do.

 – William S. Burroughs

Tech details

  • Used RiTa.js to get "similar sounding words" based on line endings
  • Search for line endings that match the input by similar sound (more tractable than searching for ANY word anywhere)
  • Concatenate lines found

Some randomness

also built in...

Let's make it more visual...

Less useful in poetry... but cool for other reasons.

It's a terrible day, but your fingers are safe!

 

  • What's a "line ending?" The RiTa sentence tokenizer was not good.
  • I dumbly used "\n" to get more matches.
  • It's slow to build the initial matches hash
  • Meter and rhyme would be better (Allison's pronouncing lib)
  • Are character names a plus or minus?

Fantastical Britain,

A Map for Allison

https://twitter.com/aparrish/status/717380189081235456

(Remind people what the UK looks like...)

Map

Can we do even better than the real British town names? 

 

  • Neural nets that don't need to worry about grammar/syntax are fast to train and use.
  • So I adapted Karpathy's RNN js code to use just the trained model in pure js.  That's cool.
  • Bought UK town names data, trained on it.
  • Plugged in model.json file & a sqlite file for Lat/Lons -- no server needed!  (Even cooler.)

tl;dr:  No, but it was fun.

Training data...

Not really better than the real thing...

"Todlewitch" & "Cople-thave"

SQL.js is really cool... load a .sqlite file (my CSV of town names converted to SQLite) and query it in JS. No server!

Finding towns between the map view bounds:

I replace their names on the map with on-demand neural net model-generated output (but keep the real names for the popups)

Genetic Castles

Genetic Algorithms

  • Evolutionary development: Gene pool, random variation, a fitness function.
    • Attributes are encoded in ranges of values (in this code each is 0-1, mapped to the "real" ranges)
    • Result of the "genes" is evaluated according to the fitness function, and new generations evolve combining the "best" survivors-- plus some randomness.

"A Genetic Algorithm of Flowers"

Clay Heaton, processing repo

Jared Tarbell's Combinatoric Critters

Adding user interaction -- voting -- is awesome. Now I decide fitness!

Shiffman's demo:

Your idea of fitness can change... based on what you see or how you feel.

But:  

I am shit at drawing with Processing.

So I bought art.

Artist: Saiana

MadameBricolage on Etsy

Similar things I bought on Etsy

Ivanhoe

Cleaning up text to make it artistic

  • Real emdashes
  • Curly quotes
  • Paragraph indents
  • Real fonts
  • Format names "better"

To Do

  • Save output of your favs
  • Vector art would be better, but p5.svg didn't work well for me
  • Save "DNA/script" for the ones that you like
  • Try a GA with text as output

Cocktail Recipes

Jordan Meyer did a great talk with NYT scraped cocktail recipes.

His ingredients data... suggests remixing.

A lot of iterated, tuned rules

A lot of tiny vocab data sets (sigh)

SentiNet, WordNet (extracted from the dict), made up...

Some design principles

  • sugar, honey : "positive" words (per SentiWordNet)
  • bitters : "negative" words
  • lots more herbs and fruits come into play
  • ice and water come in more forms (hail, snow, lakewater...)
  • alcohols are substituted with other drink types and maybe drugs like prozac
  • Club sodas come in varieties, like "book club soda", "golf club soda"
  • when all other rules fail, use a word that sounds similar (RiTa.js) -- some of the best results!

new mythologies: the lakewatermelon

"a dash of nutmeg" :

"a dash of nightmare"

"an ounce of cream" :

"an ounce of scream"

"Serendipitous" bugs

This was a very manual authoring process.

  • But it made me laugh more than the others!
  • Generate recipes, tune rules... ad infinitum
  • Lists of words were not automatically findable.
  • Obviously a "simpler" approach might be plausible, like using word2vec or an RNN, but we also want it to be "funny" and "different"
  • How can this be made easier?

Thanks!

https://ghostweather.slides.com/

lynncherny/a-little-twist-on-reality/

Lynn Cherny, @arnicas

lynn@cherny.com

A Little Twist on Reality

By Lynn Cherny

A Little Twist on Reality

Talk for Alt-Ai in NYC, May 22, 2016

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